A short advisory clip by Dennis H. Lewis recommending that founders hire people who understand the business and will challenge assumptions rather than simply agree. He advises evaluating candidates for business thinking, curiosity, and willingness to question product ideas — even when it makes the founder uncomfortable — to avoid building poorly-fitting solutions.
Chapters
And I think that most founders, what they need is somebody that is beside them, that understands the business, that understands the goals that what you're trying to achieve. They may not have the domain experience in your industry, but they're capable of acquiring the vision that you're able to give them and translating it into a technical solution and working with you. And it's not. You may not find that person the first time around. You may not find them the second time around. I'll give you, you a hint. You're listening to this episode. You're. You're listening to people that have been doing this for a long time successfully. That's just a subtle hint. But if you're interviewing for an employee, don't just ask them about the tech part of their skills. Okay? Try to suss out if they're able to think from a business point of view, if they're able to bring to the table ideas that you hadn't have. You know, when you explain the idea that you have for your application, do they, do they question you? That's a good sign. If they're asking questions that are like, maybe making you uncomfortable, I would say that's a good sign because that means they're, they're putting in some effort to really thinking through the, the, the business side of what you're trying to build before just taking your money and, and delivering something to you. Because I'll be frank with. Sometimes we sit down with potential customers and we say, look, this isn't a good fit, or I just don't see this being a worthwhile venture. And if it's not, we're fine, we're comfortable in saying it, because I don't want to take your money, build something, give you something, and then have you badmouth us down the road because we built something that didn't make sense. Right. But that's just our way of doing business.
